Sabrina & Corina: Stories

Sierra, a girl in eighth grade in a southern Colorado town named Saguarita, narrates this story. An unusually snowy and rainy spring has left the soil soft, and a few of Sierra’s male classmates have decided to take shovels and picks to an area on the town’s western edge, “a place where the land with its silken fibers of swaying grass resembled a sleeping woman with her face pressed firmly to the pillow, a golden blonde by day, a raven-haired beauty by night” (3).

A boy named Robbie Martinez first hits bone during the impromptu excavation. The boys are quick to discover broken bits of pottery and human teeth, “scattered like dried kernels of yellow corn” (4). While Robbie initially acts blasé about his discovery, he quickly realizes that they must not disturb the site any further—and they must inform the rest of the townspeople about it. The boys bring word back, and soon the entire town is buzzing.

A few days later, the eighth-grade project is announced at Sierra’s school: Their teacher Mrs. Sharply tells them that they will each be randomly paired with a student of the opposite gender and tasked with raising “babies”—which are bags of sugar that have been dressed in baby beanies and diapers. The grading criteria for the project will include “feeding, bonding, budgeting, and more” (5). Sierra and Robbie are paired up for the project. Robbie, with the sugar baby nestled in his lap, asks Sierra what she’d like to name it. She flatly tells him to name it and take it home with him that night. When he asks if Miranda is a good name, “whatever” is her terse reply, before she leaves and goes home.

The next morning, there are aerial shots of the burial site on the little black-and-white TV in Sierra’s kitchen. She lives with her father, who says, “Ain’t that something” (6). When Sierra asks if they can go see the site, her father tells her that that is most probably not allowed: “Why not? We should be allowed to […] It’s where we’re from. It’s our people,” Sierra replies (6). Her father tells her that such things as the discovery of the burial site have happened many times before, and don’t warrant a special visit. Then, Sierra looks out the window above the kitchen sink: She sees her mother, Josie, has arrived without notice.

Three years ago, Sierra’s mother abandoned the family. One day, during winter, she left the house with her keys, a coat, and no shoes. When Sierra asked her father why her mother left, he replied: “Sometimes a person’s unhappiness can make them forget they are a part of something bigger, something like a family, a people, even a tribe” (8). After that, Josie returned to gather her things and visit occasionally, but those visits were so sparse that Sierra accustomed herself to life without her. The process was difficult at first, as she initially had to fight the instinct to share important or exciting things with her mother, to spend time with her—but eventually, her desire to have a relationship with her mother became absent, like her mother herself.

The next day, at school, Sierra tells Robbie that Miranda cried all night—and that she consequently got no sleep—before thrusting the sugar bag into his hands: “How could she cry? She’s only sugar,” he replies (11). Sierra has also lost the sugar baby’s outfit and is unapologetic about it. Robbie then fishes a fresh diaper out of his backpack and secures it on the bag, chiding that their grade will be marked down if she isn’t wearing a fresh one. Sierra watches him work with the bag as she admires her handiwork: She’s given Miranda a new face this morning: “Her eyelashes [are] tarantula-like and her mouth [is] downturned” (11).

Josie inserts herself into Sierra and her father’s home life—blending poorly into it in a manner much like Miranda, in Sierra’s opinion. Sierra watches as her mother bustles about the home cooking and cleaning. She begins making Sierra’s bed and arranging her stuffed animals in a pile upon it—a pile that Sierra proceeds to throw to the ground every day when she comes home. Sierra also becomes nauseated when she sees her father and mother dancing intimately.

One day, Josie takes Sierra on an impromptu car drive, without telling her where they are going. They end up on a hill that overlooks the dig site. Sierra observes that the hole is rather shallow, and has been divided into a grid. As Sierra watches her mother on the hillside with the wind tousling her hair, she reminisces about how beautiful she once thought her mother was. Josie entreats Sierra to close her eyes and hold her arms against the wind. Sierra follows her mother’s instructions, and a memory from when she was 10 years old, shortly before her mother abandoned the family for the first time, returns to her. She remembers walking through a small church in Mexico with her mother. She remembers that Josie sent many prayers up to the sky that day, but Sierra had only one single prayer: “Please, [she] pleaded to the Virgin, don’t let my mother cry anymore” (15). Sierra had been tired of finding her mother silently sobbing throughout the house. However, when Sierra opens her eyes and her mother asks her if she felt anything, Sierra tells her that she felt nothing.

Once home, Sierra goes looking for more markers to add some tattoos to Miranda’s “skin.” In the process, she finds a card that her mother sent to her for her 11th birthday. This was the first birthday she had after her mother left for the first time. She treats the card gingerly and delicately, and as she opens it, the marigolds that Josie had placed inside the card tumble out. The flowers are in a state of decay. Her mother’s message reads: “To my baby, Sierra. Today is your birthday, and when you were born, I knew everything would change, that every day would be your day, and that nothing would be the same” (19). She then talks to Miranda, telling her that the letter is from her mother. For an instant, she pictures Miranda as a real baby. She kisses the sugar sack on the forehead and whispers, “I don’t know if I’m very nice to you” (19).

Just then, Josie appears in the doorway. She tells Sierra that she’s good with the “baby”—and Sierra replies that Miranda isn’t real. Josie joins Sierra on her bed and starts talking to her about the school assignment. Although she finds it odd to be preparing children who are only 13 years old for parenthood, she sees some value in the exercise as well: “I’m not sure if anyone is prepared for raising a child. It doesn’t seem to be something we can practice for before it actually happens” (20).

When Sierra says that she can’t wait to be done with the sugar baby project, Josie tells her to just wait until she has a real baby. She reminds Sierra that she was only three years older than her when she gave birth to her, and that she had to quit school as a result of her pregnancy. Sierra asks her if she missed school, and Josie tells her that she did—although she didn’t recognize it as such at the time, because she simply felt sad. She tells her that she takes classes at a community college now, which Sierra could also do someday. Sierra then notices that her mother looks happy and youthful. Josie, looking at the tattoos that Sierra has now emblazoned across Miranda’s back, tells her daughter that she will probably be an artist someday: “That’s what I wanted to be,” Josie says (21).

Josie then offers to braid Sierra’s hair in a tight plait that will last for several days. Sierra immediately pulls away, but soon gravitates right back toward her mother: “I was ashamed of myself that I still wanted her close to me, even after everything she had done,” she narrates (21). She then lets her mother braid her hair, and almost falls asleep in her arms as she holds the sugar baby in her own embrace. She fantasizes about her mother, in an advanced age, coming to visit her as an adult: “In the distance, I see her arriving, joyously waving to me, her last stop” (22).

The next morning, Sierra finds her father eating alone at the table. She doesn’t have to ask: She knows that her mother has left and is on her way back to Denver. Sierra’s father informs her that the dig site is being closed: “Those Indians on the ridge, they got some formal petition going,” he says (22). He apologizes for not taking her to the dig site before it got shut down. Sierra then informs her that she did see it, because her mother took her to it. Sierra’s father swallows hard and obtrusively shakes his newspaper in lieu of a reply. Sierra then tells her father that she does not feel well, and he consents to letting her stay home from school for the day.

At three o’clock, there’s a knock at the front door. It’s Robbie, who breathlessly informs Sierra that their sugar baby is dead. He drew SIDS from the hat at school that day. Sierra asks him if they are supposed to just throw Miranda away now: “‘But we can’t,’ Robbie [whines]. ‘It’s Miranda’” (23). Then, an idea strikes Sierra.

The two children bike to the edge of the hill where Josie took Sierra earlier. They stand there, “listening to the grumbling moan of the clouds and the far-off crackling of thunder,” for a while (23). Then, Sierra sets her sights on a spot that “easy to aim for in the middle of the pit” (24). Robbie stops her in disbelief at first, but then, with “those big sad eyes,” he tells Sierra that he is the one who can kick the sugar baby further (24): “You’re going to kick our baby into her grave?” Sierra asks (24). Robbie replies, “I play soccer, Sierra” (24).

Robbie then takes the sugar baby from Sierra’s arms and sets it gently on the hill’s edge. After a wind-up, he gives the bag a mighty kick, and Miranda lifts into the air “as if she was nothing more than a helium balloon. She [twirls] in the air as her sugar insides [spiral] out of her body from a hole Robbie’s foot [has] torn in the bag” (24). As sugar catches on the wind and blows away, and the sack lands with a final thud into the burial site, Sierra thinks to herself, “How pretty” (24).